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How a banking group achieved an ROI of over $4 million

We all hope for substantial gains from IT investments, but imagine achieving a return on investment (ROI) of more than AUD $4 million within the first year. That's a pretty impressive result!

Like most organizations today, Australia and New Zealand Banking Group Limited (ANZ) faced significant pressures to reduce costs. The bank had a substantial increase in the demand for its IT services and realized that simply adding more resources to keep up with the demand was not the answer. Instead, they needed to achieve greater efficiency and productivity. The company has reduced project start-up time from three months to four weeks and has substantially reduced training time.

With help from the IBM Rational team, they identified several areas for improvement. For example:

For every six weeks of testing, teams spent two weeks setting up the appropriate environments.

In addition, because the bank lacked a central repository, assets were scattered throughout the company on various personal computers or multiple LANs, which of course increased delays and the risk of assets being lost.

Finally, there was the stress of audits to ensue that the bank had the necessary traceability to demonstrate compliance with processes and regulations.

ANZ launched a company-wide initiative to achieve its business goals of greater traceability, increased agility through collaboration, and automation for improved quality. Because the company has delivery centers around the globe, the solution had to support geographically distributed teams.

After evaluating 26 technology solutions for their company-wide initiative, ANZ Banking Group chose IBM Rational software. With help from Rational solutions, ANZ now has a single consistent, scalable development environment that provides the needed traceability, collaboration, and automation.

"Using the Rational software makes us more agile," says Ben McCoy, service optimization manager at ANZ. With standard tools and processes across the enterprise, the company has reduced project start-up time from three months to four weeks and has substantially reduced training time.

"Execution is quicker, so we can respond a lot better to program needs," says McCoy. Through the increased level of automation, ANZ has been able to reduce the number of people needed for each project. In the past, they would typically assign seven people to each project. Now, they assign just three or four. Additionally, teams can now deploy components in 15 minutes, a process that previously took three days.

"Our costs are flat, even though our demand has increased by about 30 to 35 percent. We’re doing more with the same amount of resource," says Frank Fabian, head of testing environments.

ANZ not only achieved an ROI of over AUD $4 million from cost savings and efficiency improvements within the first year, they did it while taking on an increasing amount of work And the future looks bright , because they expect to exceed their target of an AUD $8.5 million ROI for the second year.

About the author

Valerie Hamilton is a Certified Senior IT Specialist and Level 2 Board Member for Americas IT Specialist Profession Certification. She has a Bachelors of Science degree in Computer Science (specializing in Systems Engineering) as well as 23 years of experience in the software industry.